James Agee Quotes

Photography has become so fundamental to the way we see that 'photography' and 'seeing' are becoming more and more synonymous. The ubiquity of photography is, perhaps ironically, a challenge to curators, practitioners, and critics.

The digital camera has given me total freedom and a different way of filming.

Let's face it, the human eye is clumsy, sloppy, and unintelligible when compared to the camera's eye.

Probably one of the worst things that happened to photography is that cameras have viewfinders.

My main camera is a Nikon D3. I use a French camera from the 1800s for wet plate photography, I use a Hasselblad sometimes. But to me the camera really doesn't matter that much. I don't have a preference for film or digital.

Whatever respect photography may once have deserved is now superfluous in view of its own superfluity.

I think technology has advanced so far now that there are some cameras on the market that give film a run for its money. It's all about flexibility in capturing images, and digital or film, it doesn't matter to me.

But the moment you use an ordinary camera, you are not seeing the picture, remember, meaning, you had to remember what you've taken. Now you could see it of course, with a digital thing, but remember in 1982 you couldn't.

The first half of the 20th century belongs to Picasso, and the second half is about photography. They said digital would kill photography because everyone can do it, but they said that about the box brownie in 1885 when it came out. It makes photography interesting because everyone thinks they can take a picture.

Photography helps people to see.

From analog film cameras to digital cameras to iPhone cameras, it has become progressively easier to take and store photographs. Today, we don't even think twice about snapping a shot.

There are almost too many possibilities. Photography is in direct proportion with our time: multiple, faster, instant. Because it is so easy, it will be more difficult.

The camera is more than a recorder, it's a microscope. It penetrates, it goes into people and you see their most private and concealed thoughts.

You put your camera around your neck along with putting on your shoes, and there it is, an appendage of the body that shares your life with you. The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.

You see the world much better through a camera.

That's the way I learned photography: You make your picture in the camera. Now, so much is made in the computer. ... I'm not anti-digital, I just think, for me, film works better.

With photography, everything is in the eye and these days I feel young photographers are missing the point a bit. People always ask about cameras but it doesn't matter what camera you have. You can have the most modern camera in the world but if you don't have an eye, the camera is worthless. Young people know more about modern cameras and lighting than I do. When I started out in photography I didn't own an exposure meter - I couldn't , they didn't exist! I had to guess.

Once digital came, I could see my images instantly right there on the camera. I think that makes you a better photographer because you can see right there if your subject's eyes are closed or if you exposed it wrong and if it's too bright or dark. You can fix it right here. With film, you wouldn't know until you got the prints back if something was messed up, and then there was nothing you could do. That was a huge advantage.

A camera is wild in just about anybody's hands, therefore one must set limits. But cameras have a life of their own. Cameras care nothing about cults or isms. They are indifferent mechanical eyes, ready to devour anything in sight. They are lenses of the unlimited reproduction.

Cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood.

I like being behind the camera because I can control perception and what people see.

The camera seems to me, next to unassisted and weaponless consciousness, the central instrument of our time.

The [35mm] camera is for life and for people, the swift and intense moments of life.

The camera sees more than the eye, so why not make use of it?

To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.